


Falling

by naznahl



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Anal Sex, Bottom Emet-Selch (Final Fantasy XIV), Dirty Talk, F/M, Pegging, She/Her Warrior of Light, Unnamed Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), bottom emet selch dot png
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-27
Updated: 2021-01-27
Packaged: 2021-03-12 16:28:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29013600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/naznahl/pseuds/naznahl
Summary: Emet-Selch and the WOL fall through their memories with one another.
Relationships: Solus zos Galvus | Emet-Selch/Warrior of Light
Comments: 12
Kudos: 47





	Falling

**Author's Note:**

> thanks 2 my rockstar friends celes & khan for giving me feedback, all grammar mistakes are mine and i give up on them so don't correct me. any other feedback is cool, i haven't actually gotten to shadowbringers and this is entirely a work of my brain worms.

The world is ending around them as she walks towards him. Lurching, perhaps, is a more apt word, like a marionette struggling against her cords. How he wishes he could cut her free, but he doesn’t have the right tools in hand. She needs to do it herself, she needs to come to him of her own will. 

Someone runs to him, attacks him. They don’t matter. She does. Her face is wretched with tears, gold dripping out of her mouth from the light leaking out of her. She walks towards him, still, as he carelessly throws a lob of magic at her. Someone creates a barrier around her, someone tries to attack him and speak to him. They don’t matter either. 

He wants to see how she can keep going. She stops, dizzy from the flashes of light around her, and collapses onto her knees. He mocks her for it, his mouth curling down as he thinks that she can’t make it further, but she starts to crawl instead. She pulls herself closer, dragging herself with the strength of just her fingertips at time, leaving behind glittering scratches on the floor. 

He can’t stop the grin that blooms when he sees the expression on her face when she stares up at him. Here she is, so full of spite and rage and ripping off the cords that have bound her for so long. Just so she can claw at him with her own hands. 

When she reaches him on her knees, he looks down at her and feels an edge of hysteria bubble up inside of him. She’s here and within his reach. He won’t bend down to pull her up. He still wants to watch what she does next. 

She clings to the edges of his coat, trying to pull him down to her level. 

“Ah, ah, ah,” he tuts at her, “you must do better than that.” 

When she responds with a scream, it’s guttural, bestial. The light pours out of her mouth and drools over her chin, dripping down to the ground to form pools of gold by his feet. He’s jerked down as she begins to pull herself up to standing using his clothes as leverage. The hysteria catches in his throat as she clings to his collar, pulling him flush against her so she can meet him eye to eye. 

She’s spinning weakly, trembling with the overspent strength it’s taken to get this far. Her eyes are glazed over, illuminated from within, the tears on her face dripping heavily as the light turns to gold on her cheeks. He can see the blood vessels in her eyes hemorrhaging so that the blood mixes with the light breaking her apart at the seams. He knows that she can’t see at all anymore and yet here she is, all her weight leaning against him, defiant in her agony. 

He wraps his arms around her. “And so you made it here to me, at last.” 

She spits in his face. 

The hysteria he’d clung onto bursts out of him as laughter, thought he can’t put a name to what it’s laughter for. It’s a cathartic relief just as much as jubilance. She’s here. She knows him, even if she doesn’t remember him the way he wants her to. She sees him, even with her deadened eyes. 

He smiles at her as she screeches wordlessly in his face again and steps back so he’s standing at the edge of the world with her in his arms. This is perhaps the first measure of peace he’s been able to hold onto for a long time. He lets her be the one to push them over. 

He wraps an arm tighter around her as she changes throughout the spheres of time they slip through. He stays the same, but he always has when it comes to her. 

Together, they fall. 

* * *

“Open your mouth,” she says. 

He's not looking at her, but he can feel the warmth radiating off her skin as she stands close above him where he’s seated at his desk. She'd been in her garden, fussing under the sun at the trees she'd raised from saplings that had borne fruit for the first time. He's fussing at the pages he's meant to be writing, but his work has not yet gotten the pleasure that hers has of blooming into something digestible. 

The sunlight streaks in behind her so she's lit from behind, but her eyes are still visible enough to him that he can see the glittering interest spark in them. 

She breaks open the darkly purple fruit with her fingertips and the slow, lazy juice of it runs down her hand, dripping onto the pages that he’s spent so long working on. He scowls at her for it and she grins in a way that he knows means she thinks he looks ridiculous in his petulance. The drip-drop of the leaking fruit spreads across the table and the scent of something sickly sweet takes to the air between them. 

“It’s called a fig,” she says lightly, opening her hands to show him the splitting pink-tinged flesh of the fruit, holding it to him in offering. “You can eat the skin of it as well.” 

As the syrup continues to slide its way down her forearm to lick its way down her skin, he realizes she won't do anything to save his work. Resigned, he reaches out to hold her wrist to pull closer to him and bites down into the fig. It's warm from the sun and her hands, but the heat of the fruit bursts into sweetness in his mouth and he has to pull her closer so he can stop the dribble of liquid down his chin. 

“Do you like it?” she asks him, her hands empty now but still held open to him. The fig juice on her hands is starting to congeal into a stickiness as it melts into her skin. 

“There's little of interest to me about the taste of fruit from one of your travels,” he says, “All these little pleasures of yours are naught in comparison to the delicacies we have right at hand within our own realm.” 

“Don’t be so boring, my heart,” she says lightly. “Even if it was not good, which it is, it’s something new that you’ve experienced today. All the knowledge of the aether you have is ‘naught in comparison’ to that.” 

He hums at her, not wishing to respond. He’s aware that it’s not the fruit being within a distant land that annoys him. Instead, he pulls her even closer to him so that she’s sliding on his lap as he licks the remaining sweetness from her hands. 

She laughs at the tickling kisses, sliding back on his desk so that his papers fall down. 

* * *

She’s leaning down over him, her hair a curtain he wakes up hidden between. He's groggy with sleep, her smell, and the strands of her hair brushing against his cheek this early in the morning. 

“Hello, my heart,” she whispers into his mouth. 

“Ah,” he responds. She's dressed, he notices. 

“Oh yes, I am aware. I informed the sun of the fact that you're not a morning person but, alas, it did not care to listen to my pleas,” she hums, straight faced. 

She leans down further to kiss him more awake but he's gotten enough of a grip on consciousness that he raises a hand to cover between their lips. 

The brow she'd raised in a teasing arc softens into a mournful furrow. “Forgive me for this,” she says against his fingertips. She places soft, anxiously regretful kisses across his hands. 

He sighs without moving his breath, the warmth of his breath heating the space between them. She’ll leave as she always does, always needs to, but she still looks at him in a way that makes him grab her shoulders and roll her beneath him. He has this much of an ability to sway her, at least. 

“I adore your nostrils, you know,” she says, placing her hands on his cheeks as he frowns down at her. She leans up and licks at his mouth. “They are so very shapely, very aristocratic, it's almost as if you should be in charge of something. And _h_ _ave_ you ever been in charge of anything? Or anyone?” 

His frown deepens, “I wasn't informed that-”, but he’s stopped by her knee pressing up at him against his length. She shifts until she can maneuver her thigh against him to rub at his cock through his clothes. 

This is a game between them but they're both aware of the fact. They know the ending to this story that they're dancing through, and it's with his heart at the window while she assures him that hers is always with him, whether the rest of her is or not. 

What does he have in him to do? He leans down to moan against her shoulder and she moves again, their bodies twisting until they're facing each other. His head is still cradled against her shoulder, but bent down so she can't meet his eyes. 

She kisses the top his head where his hair parts. She reaches down to pull his clothes off his body. “Tell me what I can do for you.” 

He feels a piece of resolve inside of him break and go into a free fall. 

* * *

She's singing a nonsense song in a language she's created, although she doesn't have to sing in a made-up language at all. She knows enough real ones she could sing in each all day and not run out by dusk, but she's chosen her gibberish, her harp, and the forest with him in tow. 

“I am always astounded by the follies on which you choose to waste your time,” he laughs at her, mocking the sudden starts and stops as she realizes her words aren't matching the rhythm the way the music and she needs them to. 

She gripes back at him, “When I can sing this all the way to the end, you will eat those words and all your pride.” 

He leans back against the tree that he's perched against, feeling the cool air of the darkening forest. He tilts his head up to stare up, not at the stars but past them, the dancing strands of creation above him. He plucks this way and that, not doing anything other than perhaps mimicking the chord of her song. 

She’s plucking at the strings of her harp, making stops to stare into the tree line above them. He knows that unlike him, her concern is only what she can see, which is what anyone else could see in this darkening day. It’s tedious to him. 

“When you finish your song, we’ll have lived through more lifetimes than any other soul in creation has.” 

He’s finally antagonized her enough that she abandons her harp to sit across from him, leaning against his shoulder and pressing her cold fingertips into the skin of his throat in retaliation. 

She wraps her arms around his neck, her own face pressed against the side of his, her mouth tickling against his ear. He embraces her waist and pulls her against his body, for the warmth of it in the chilling air. 

“I love you but I will steal away in the night with all your clothes for the winter months if you don't listen.” 

“Listening to you is always a thrill for the senses, my heart, but I can think of far better ways to occupy time betwixt two lovers.” 

“Quiet, quiet. I said listen.” 

And he does, simply because she's asked him to. As his laughter lulls and his heart stops pounding, the quietness settles around him enough he can hear the forest. He closes his eyes so that his mind can settle enough that he can focus, close out the distractions of the aether around them so that he can only hear what she wants him to, what any mortal could. 

And then, the birds. 

It isn't strange for him to hear the cacophony of the dawn chorus, as it's always been a favorite of hers to wake to but this is different. Instead of building chirps and screeches of the morning time, there's a more subtle rhythm to this ensemble. 

He hears two of them singing back and forth to each other, (“Those are robins singing a courtship song,” she says) before a cluster of small ones, (“Sparrows, they’re looking for a better place to sleep,” she says) suddenly take flight. The fluttering of wings covers the opening notes of a single tune calling out a mournful quiet flute song (“A nightingale,” she says) into the setting sun. 

She names the birds for him, one by one. He knows them, could pluck their names from the air without a bit of effort, but this is different. This isn’t a world he had a hand in creating. This is just something that was. 

“Do you hear?” she whispers. 

“I hear.” It's her song, the one she had been composing all day. The gentle call and response, followed by long pulled out syllables into a stretching silence. A farewell.

He moves to bury his head in her chest, his ear pressed against her to hear her heartbeat. He rocks them gently, swaying to the flow of the night chorus of birds around them. And then he tilts them over to fall on the forest floor. 

* * *

_Tell me what I can do for you,_ she'd said, as if the correct verbiage wasn't always, _tell me what you_ _want me to do to you,_ instead. 

So, he'd asked her to fuck him, because he wanted to and it was easier than the other dances he could initiate with her. She kisses him gently, leaving him on the cold bed to undress before returning with a small chest clasped in her arms. 

She returns to their bed and to kissing him across his cheeks, his nose, and forehead as he frowns at her still. He'd noticed too easily how he only felt warm again when she was close to him. 

“Don't make that face, I beg you,” she says, and it's more wrecked in tone than he'd anticipated for a game they've played before. 

His face softens at her, knowing that her own obligations tied her into knots that he couldn't unbind for her. He holds her hand and brings it to his lips. No matter her force of will, he does not think she could live bound to anyone other than herself for so long. He would keep that wish to see who she was beyond her knots buried within him. 

“I understand that there's nothing within my grasp that can make you stay, but be here with me with all of who you are for now,” he says. 

She closes her eyes, and he can follow her slowing breath counts enough that he knows exactly when she'll open her eyes to look at him. 

“Hades, come here,” she beckons. 

He obliges, pulling up to his knees so she can reach his face to kiss him, hot mouth on his, breathing warmth and life into him. 

She pushes him down back into the bed and lifts a leg over to perch onto his torso. 

She looks down at him one last time before pressing her fingertips against him to keep his eyelids shut before tying the blindfold across his face. 

She's smiling again even if it's still a little wavering now, which he knows even without seeing her. He knows she’s smiling because he knows her, even without any power or effort on his behalf, because he's understood all the want that she's housed inside her since she first kissed him. It drove him to a brink to realize he could turn that unyielding energy to be directed at him. He'd wanted her back with the same obsessive need ever since. 

“I'm going to keep your arms and legs free but don't move at all. Stay still.” 

Her weight disappears off the top of him and there's enough breath counts afterwards that he almost believes that she's used the opportunity to leave the way she'd planned to. She wouldn’t, and he doesn't believe it but his instinct is to reach out for her anyway and - 

“Don't do that,” she tuts from off to his left side. 

She returns and he feels her settle back on top of him. He can feel skin against skin now, the heat of her thighs pressing against his thighs makes him start to twitch. 

“I like you as my fuck toy,” she says, “so don't move again until I say so.” 

And if he gets hard at that, it's only because she says it so carelessly. He's always adored her simple snap to cruelties, always adored how he can bring out her possessiveness in such an attentive way, where all his movements are tracked meticulously under her gaze. 

She shifts back on him, so that his cock presses against the cleft of her ass. He feels her hand as she reaches back to press a single fingertip against his still-hardening cock. She runs a feather light nail down the length of him and it shouldn't be anything at all close enough to make him harder, but it does, because it's her. 

He gasps lightly, and it sounds little mocking because it is, and knows how that sharpens the edges of her against him. 

He feels her other hand reaching up his chest, not doing more than leaving pinprick scratches that make sure his nipples stay erect throughout her tiny, uncaring ministrations. 

He grips his hands into the sheets next to him, and he knows she sees him as she intakes a sharp breath at him for it. He loves being watched by her, because he knows that no one can see him like this except for her. 

Her weight shifts back on him, and she wraps her hands around his length, gripping lightly enough that it just feels like something, just enough that he can almost feel something. 

He moans out in a plea more than in pleasure. 

“You know that I enjoy seeing you stay this desperate for as long as I can have you be so?” 

The hair on his body prickles up at her words, because he _is_ desperate, just pressed against her ass enough that they can both feel it but without the friction needed to relieve him. He's only just barely leaking but she won't make any significant motion to make him any closer to cumming. 

She moves her hips in a sudden snapping jerk so his sensitive skin hits against the cleft of her ass again. 

He moans out her name, too loud for what the sensation was, more of a surprise than anything else. She presses his cock against her again, rubbing it between her cheeks with her hand for the friction against her he’d craved until he’s standing at an aching attention, and he is moaning more than breathing. 

“Spread your legs for me, love,” she says, “I want to fuck you like you asked me to.” 

And she is gone again from him, leaving him with just the cold slick of both of their wetness across his stomach. He can't even begin to count properly until she's back, pressing her hands against his thighs to push them apart further. 

His body tenses in anticipation as he feels her exploring fingers circle around his ass. She presses a cold, wetted knuckle in to test the stretch of him. He gasps, his shoulders lifting up from the bed in instinct when she decides he can take two of her fingers. 

He's upset at the cold bite of the lubricant, and he moans, although it sounds more like a whine, at the displeasure of it. 

“I love you so under my hands like this, you know? I want to fuck you so badly. Do you want me inside you, too? Can you say it?” 

He feels her fingers move away and get replaced by her hot breath. 

“Yes, yes,” he moans out in a strangled gasp as she licks at him, tonguing his rim before pressing it flat and inside him. 

Despite his repeated wrangled affirmations, she makes him wait as she works him open so that she can fit enough inside him that she thinks she needs him to. She gives him one final sharp bite on the soft of his thigh before moving her mouth away from him. 

When she presses back into him, it's a different sensation altogether and he feels a moan twist inside him as he flinches back instinctively from the pain of it. 

She's covered herself in the same lubricant as her fingers and it's still cold, still unpleasant to feel where her heat had been before, but his mouth is open to gasp at the stretch he feels regardless. 

She enters him so leisurely, enough that he wants to scream out at the aching lack of her, but he opens his mouth right when she pushes in deeply to fit the length of her inside of him. 

The perched scream in his throat comes out as a sob. He sucks in another breath, right as she starts to move in him, rocking both their bodies back and forth so they both feel the press of each other. 

The heat between them, of her breath, of her skin, of the place where they meet at his base, it all makes him feel so debauched, his moaning coming out low from his chest. 

He sobs again as she lifts a leg of his to sit on her shoulder, pushing into him even deeper than before, but moving far too gently still for him. She's searching, curiously and without any hurry for where to push at him where his body will make him start crying in earnest. 

When she finds that place within him, the tears well up in his eyes, and she breathes out raggedly as she reaches for his uselessly bouncing cock to hold him in a way that matches their rhythm. 

“Hades, Hades, my heart,” she chants, “I love your face like this, I love you crying as you take me in.” 

He chokes out, his words hiccupping on her movements, “and here, I thought, you could me fuck me, harder, than that.” 

She laughs at him and presses his leg down deeper into a stretch he won't be able to maintain for long at all. She thrusts in so deeply to the place she'd found before that he lets out a hoarse yelp. 

“Can you cum now? I want to see you now. My heart, my love. I adore you and I want you to cum.” 

And he does, over her hand and clenching against her so that she moans at the pressure pull of him. 

She fucks him uselessly for a few extra thrusts that don't mean anything to either at them other than a rutting instinct that comes to a tepid stop as they both twitch with their orgasms. 

“Are you well?” she asks 

He snorts at her derisively at the emptiness when she pulls herself out of him. 

She laughs at him for it, her eyes falling shut— 

* * *

_No, no. Not this time._ This isn't a moment he can let slip by again. He won't let this memory dissolve with the figs or the birds. Let her relive this and know exactly how she left him. His anguish should be hers, because they've shared everything until now. She needs to know who he is. 

* * *

—her eyes falling shut in delight at his temper. 

He can hear her wobble gingerly around the bed to pull his blindfold off. She smiles down at him. 

“Look at this,” she says as she shows him her closed fist. She opens her hand to show him the thick strand of his cum stretching between her fingers. 

“Open your mouth,” she says. 

“Absolutely not,” he says, which leads to an immediate physical struggle that ends with the handful of cum smeared across both their faces, her body pulled across his as a warming blanket. 

She sighs into his sweat smelling neck. “I can't stay, still, I'm afraid. I might not be able to walk as fast or ride on a mount for a while, but I can’t stay.” 

He shrugs disaffectedly as best he can with his shaking body, his mouth bitter. 

She laughs at him. “Listen to me. I love you, you know. There's nothing in me that will never stop loving you.” 

He sighs in his own world-weary way as he lets go of the tension that had been reforming in him. He turns to look at her, “And there's a part of me that will never stop waiting for you, I suppose.” 

She smiles, and her eyes shine at him. “You are my heart. I will come back to you.” 

He kisses her for what he thought was endlessly at the time, but not enough, really. He misjudged the timing. 

She leaves him, disappearing into the dying red and brown hues of the fall. 

* * *

They land back where they started, bodies slamming into each other as they fall into each other. She looks at him, and she is different than before, but different than the time before that as well. She's someone new. 

She sees him now, so clearly. The light still pours out from her mouth. 


End file.
